


waited for you at the crossroads of this life and the next

by HearJessRoar



Category: Julie and The Phantoms (TV)
Genre: Emotional Hurt, F/M, Gen, Grief/Mourning, moving on with your life after three ghosts ruin you forever by julie molina, sometimes the ending we want isn't the ending we get, this one hurts yall you aint gonna be happy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-27
Updated: 2020-10-27
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:28:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,244
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27224260
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HearJessRoar/pseuds/HearJessRoar
Summary: so why weren't you there?Julie hangs onto them for as long as she possibly can.It isn't nearly long enough.
Relationships: Alex & Julie Molina & Luke Patterson & Reggie, Julie Molina/Luke Patterson
Comments: 53
Kudos: 271





	waited for you at the crossroads of this life and the next

Julie Molina sits crosslegged in front of the headstone, pulling up grass with her fidgeting fingers.

The sun is warm on her back, like a comforting hand, and she smiles despite herself. She shifts, and says, “Been awhile, huh?”

This used to be awkward, years ago, but Julie has had more practice than she likes at this. “I’ve got another album coming out next month, can you believe that?”

She twists the blades of green green grass in her hands, shredding it and staining her fingertips.

Julie Molina turned thirty this morning.

Her mother has missed fifteen birthdays now. 

That’s exactly as many as she had been present for, Julie ponders fleetingly.

She reaches out, the ruined grass falling to an old grave, and traces her nails over the too-familiar letters of Luke Patterson’s headstone.

“You always believed in me, Luke.” she says quietly, listening to the birds in the distance.

His final resting place is nice, she thinks. 

There’s an open sky and trees along the fenceline that offer privacy for the ones left behind to mourn. His parents are getting on in years, but they still visit weekly, and there are always fresh flowers by the bundle to keep him company. She sighs, and tips her head back, fighting the burn in the corners of her eyes.

Her boys have been dead for thirty nine years, and gone for ten.

Ten years, she’s been doing this.

She had them for less than four.

But she had meant it, those words she’d sung a lifetime ago, up on that stage under the hot hot lights, Luke’s eyes boring directly into hers.

_you’re a part of me, now ‘til eternity_

The tears come like they always do, salty sticky on her cheeks, dripping off her chin.

“I miss you so much,” she confesses to the earth.

Julie Molina, her eyes puffy, presses her fingertips to her lips. She touches Luke’s name, gently, reverently, and her chest heaves with a choked sob.

She lets herself break for a moment, just for a moment, then wipes her eyes with her jacket cuffs and pushes herself to her feet. As much as she wants to spend the whole day here with him, she can’t.

She has other friends to visit today.

Reggie’s parents buried him in the same cemetery. But it’s a different section, and it’s a bit of a walk.

Julie’s glad for that.

She needs it to recover herself.

Because today, against her will, she remembers.

Remembers the morning of her twentieth birthday, remembers waking up and stretching in bed, the light filtering through her curtains in dappled beams. 

Remembers her empty apartment.

At first, she had thought that maybe they were playing a prank on her. But as the day wore on and her coffee got cold, so did the stab of dawning horror in her soul.

She’d found the letter in her fridge, perched so innocently on a plastic takeout box housing a single pink cupcake.

Over the years, she had read it and reread it so many times that the words were permanently etched into the corners of her mind, the paper going soft like fabric the more she folded and unfolded it, handling it constantly. Even now it feels like it burns a hole in the side pocket of her purse, because she doesn't go anywhere without it.

 _Jules,_ it began in Alex’s neat penmanship, _I’m writing this because Luke’s handwriting is crappy at the best of times, and he’s shaking so bad right now he can’t hold a pen anyway._

_It’s a bad time for us to go, and we know that. It’ll never be the right time. We’ve held on for as long as we can, because we don’t want to leave you. Please never think that we wanted to go._

_We completed our unfinished business a while ago, and we’re pretty sure we’re only being held here by your love and our stubbornness. We never told you because we didn’t want you to worry. We didn’t want to leave you here alone._

At this point, the newly twenty year old Julie Molina had sunk to her kitchen floor in disbelief. Her back had pressed against the cabinet, the handle digging into her shoulder. She could barely feel it, the palm of her hand over her mouth like she could keep the impending sobs contained in the cage of her chest that way.

There had been no mention of exactly what their unfinished business had been, and Julie knows the omission was purposeful on Alex’s part. He had been trying to be kind, but the question has haunted her for a decade.

What had been her boys’ last sanctioned night, and how long had they been on borrowed time just for her, to keep her happy?

_But we can’t stay. The pull is too strong, and we’re fading. We know you’ve noticed, too. We just wanted to tell you we love you, one last time, but it doesn’t look like we’re gonna make it to morning._

_There’s too much to say in a letter, and Reggie keeps crying on the paper-_

Here, Reggie’s blocky letters had interrupted with a **SO WHAT IF I AM?** and even Julie, as heartbroken as she was, had to tamp down on a gasping, snotty laugh at that.

In the present, she reaches her bassist’s grave, the final remnants of the brother she never got to keep, and kneels.

“Hi, Reg,” she murmurs, reaching to pull a weed out from the soft earth. His headstone isn’t as well maintained as Luke’s, but it always looks in better shape than Alex’s neglected slab of bronze plating.

She clears out the overgrown brush methodically, Alex’s words echoing in her head despite the fact she’d never heard him say any of them out loud.

_You’re the best thing that ever happened to us, Jules. In life or death. We’re sorry the time has been too short, but it’s been the greatest time that three sad ghost boys could have ever asked for._

_So like your mom said; wake up, if it’s all you do._

_Live for us, Jules._

_We love you._

They’d signed their names, Reggie dotting his i with a little heart she knew he’d put there to make her smile.

The second note had fallen out, hours later, when she’d pulled the cupcake out of the fridge. It fluttered to the floor so delicately for something that contained her heavy heart.

She might have been able to somewhat keep it together if she’d never found it.

Luke’s shaky pencil strokes were engraved into the paper. He always held his pens so tightly, like he could shove meaning into every letter if only he wrote hard enough.

_Julie,_

_In life or in death, I’ve never loved anyone as much as I love you._

_I’m sorry._

_Yours, from now until all the stars fall from your eyes,_

_Luke._

The cupcake had hit the floor with a splatter, pink frosting licking up the sides of her slippers and the hems of her pajama pants.

And Julie Molina had cried.

Sometimes, she thinks, it feels like she never stops crying.

But she has lived, like Alex asked her to.

Reggie’s headstone is as neat as it ever will be, little bare spots in the grass where she’s yanked up the weeds. She runs her hand over the top of the polished, rectangular granite, traces the engraving just as she did for Luke.

From her purse, she pulls out a single guitar pick, and places it in the tiny embedded flowerpot that’s been empty on his grave for years. “Carlos found this the other day. He wanted me to give it back to you.”

She had considered keeping it, a good luck charm, a last token from Reggie. But Carlos had been so sad when he’d found it wedged in the baseboard of the kitchen while he helped their dad remodel, she couldn’t bear to see the look on his face if he knew she’d kept it.

She gets shakily to her feet, tells Reggie goodbye with the sturdiest voice she can manage, and begins the trek back to the parking lot.

She has one more lost boy to see.

Flynn had been the one to point out that she needed to say something about the band, if only for the fans' sake. It had been the last thing on Julie’s mind, the fog that clouded over her brain refusing to let up for nearly a month and a half.

They agreed that they’d keep it simple.

Julie and the Phantoms had split up. Their reasons were vague, but Julie Molina was officially going solo, and the frantic comments were rolling in on the livestream.

No, there wasn’t any animosity towards her bandmates, she’d said into her webcam.

No, she didn’t know why no one had seen the boys lately, she lied.

Yes, she still loved them with her whole heart and soul, she said, the camera picking up the tears in her eyes and turning them bright and glossy.

Nobody asked her any more questions after that.

And little by little, her band, her family, was forgotten in time, and by the release of her second album, nobody but her most devoted fans had even heard of Julie and the Phantoms.

It had been like losing them all over again.

The drive is not a short one, and her mind wanders in the early evening sunlight. She’s made this trip several times, and it never gets any easier to see the end of it.

He’s buried under a tree, on a hill, with the smallest of plaques pressed into the earth to commemorate him.

His name, and two dates with a dash in between them.

She presses her fingers to the raised line, and thinks about how it represents a whole seventeen years.

Julie believes Alex should have another dash, after 1995. One for the years he had with her, with Willie, with Luke and Reggie and their music. Their second chance.

Years ago, she had put a little Pride sticker on his gravemarker, just to brighten it up. It had been gone the next time she visited, tacky glue and angrily torn paper that wouldn’t come off entirely the only thing left of it.

And Julie had sobbed for her friend who had never gotten the support he so deserved from people who had the nerve to sit at his sad little graveside and pretend they loved him like she did.

Today she mourns a decade without him.

She had fallen asleep at nineteen, with the best people she had ever known watching television in her living room, safe and warm and happy.

She had woken up at twenty to a cold and lonely apartment, and a jagged hole in her life that could never be properly patched for as long as she lived.

Julie doesn’t want to fix it, that raw, bleeding part of her.

It keeps them real, keeps their memory from fading.

She needs those memories, those last pieces of her boys, no matter how they hurt her. 

Of dancing in her socks with Reggie in her kitchen as Tanya Tucker wails, _Delta Dawn, what’s that flower you have on? Could it be a faded rose from days gone by?_ His smile when she tells him his songs are incredible and _yes of course_ we’re gonna record them.

_we never got that far. Reggie, I'm sorry._

Of Alex’s laughter as she tries and fails to spin the drumsticks around her fingers the way he does, sending them flying across the studio. The way he’d been so nervous when he introduced her to Willie, like her approval was important to him.

_as if I could ever disapprove of someone who made you smile that much._

Of her stolen, gone too soon moments with Luke, pressed too close on the piano bench and biting her lip like she can’t see him staring intently at her mouth every time she does it, shoving his face away playfully and telling him to focus on the music.

_I still love you so much I can’t stand it sometimes._

She lays down, stretches out alongside Alex’s grave in the setting sun, and tells herself he isn’t really in it.

They buried a corpse in a suit, but her Alex was never in that casket. Her Reggie was never shoveled under six feet of dirt and left to rot.

Her Luke…

They’d never been part of these graves, she convinces herself. Nothing like dying to get busy living, really.

She loved them, and she lost them, and to this day it's a struggle for assurance that the joy of knowing them outweighed the pain of being left by them.

Because they had, they _left her here,_ no matter how unwillingly it had been done on their part.

She never could have guessed exactly how prophetic her own words would turn out to be for her when she’d put them on paper at sixteen, Luke hanging over her shoulder while they worked out the melody. Never would have expected how deeply they could cut her now.

“ _...even if I’m the last standing,_ ” she hums to herself, tears trailing steadily to the grass on either side of her head. “ _I’ma stand tall…_ ”

If she listens closely, she can almost hear her boys on the echo.

Julie Molina is freshly thirty, and today she weeps.

**Author's Note:**

> ur probably mad at me but just know that as a woman who has loved and lost too many people way too young, this was _really cathartic_ to write
> 
> anyway comment and let me know how upset you are i wanna hear it


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